Human Rights Protection

Giving cash and loans to a government to build projects such as power plants will not help the country if government officials skim off a large share and give contracts to cronies incapable of implementing those projects. Providing experts to improve the legal infrastructure of the country will not help if local judges refuse to enforce the new laws because of corruption or tradition or incompetence. Pressuring governments to combat corruption will not help if payoffs to mob bosses, clan chiefs, or warlords are needed to maintain social order. Demanding that aid recipients use money in ways that they believe unnecessary can encourage governments to evade the conditions of the donations.

The women's rights movement succeeded in gaining for many women the right to vote. National liberation movements in many countries succeeded in driving out colonial powers. One of the most influential was Mahatma Gandhi's leadership of the Indian independence movement. Movements by long-oppressed racial and religious minorities succeeded in many parts of the world, among them the civil rights movement, and more recent diverse identity politics movements, on behalf of women and minorities in the United States. Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace.

Human Rights First is a nonpartisan, 501, international human rights organization based in New York and Washington, DC. We do not favor or oppose any candidate for public office. In his influential book The White Man’s Burden, William Easterly argues that much of the foreign-aid establishment is in the grip of an ideology that is a softer-edge version of the civilising mission of 19th-century imperialists. Easterly himself does not oppose regulated markets and liberal democracy, nor does he oppose foreign aid. He instead attacks the ideology of the “planners” – people who believe that the west can impose a political and economic blueprint that will advance wellbeing in other countries. The reason these kinds of problems arise on the international but not on the national level is that within countries, the task of interpreting and defining vaguely worded rights, and making trade-offs between different rights, is delegated to trusted institutions. It was the US supreme court, for example, that decided that freedom of speech did not encompass fraudulent, defamatory, and obscene statements.

Life, Liberty, Equality And Dignity

When the materials have disappeared from the web in one, five, or twenty years from now, important web-based human rights documentation will still be available for academics and activists. Documentation is vast and that bulk harvesting efforts of web-based human rights documentation are limited by the HRDI’s resources and budget to archive through Archive-It. The limit is currently approximately 300 websites; thus, current efforts only archive a fraction of the available documentation. HRW is a nonprofit, international organization that investigates and reports on human rights issues. But many of them are being surveilled, and parents have often been kept in the dark. In the rush to connect kids to virtual classrooms during the Covid-19 pandemic, many governments failed to check that their education technology recommendations were safe for children to use.

Human Rights: Legal Aspects

What my right to life really means is that no-one ought to take my life away from me; it would be wrong to do so. Human rights simply extend this understanding on an individual level to every human being on the planet. Individuals from some countries may also be able to take a complaint of human rights violations to a United Nations committee of experts, which would then give its opinion. Ideas about justice were prominent in the thinking of philosophers in the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment.

International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia And Biphobia

The Chinese model of development, which combines political repression and economic liberalism, has attracted numerous admirers in the developing world. Political authoritarianism has gained ground in Russia, Turkey, Hungary and Venezuela. Backlashes against LGBT rights have taken place in countries as diverse as Russia and Nigeria. The traditional champions of human rights – Europe and the United States – have floundered. Europe has turned inward as it has struggled with a sovereign debt crisis, xenophobia towards its Muslim communities and disillusionment with Brussels.

Similarly the ex Soviet bloc countries and Asian countries have tended to give priority to economic, social and cultural rights, but have often failed to provide civil and political rights. Every person and all peoples are entitled to active, free and meaningful participation in, contribution to, and enjoyment of civil, political, economic, social and cultural development, through which human rights and fundamental freedoms can be realized. The truth is that human rights law has failed to accomplish its objectives. There is little evidence that human rights treaties, on the whole, have improved the wellbeing of people. The reason is that human rights were never as universal as people hoped, and the belief that they could be forced upon countries as a matter of international law was shot through with misguided assumptions from the very beginning. The human rights movement shares something in common with the hubris of development economics, which in previous decades tried to alleviate poverty by imposing top-down solutions on developing countries.

The UDHR, which turned 70 in 2018, continues to be the foundation of all international human rights law. Its 30 articles provide the principles and building blocks of current and future human rights conventions, treaties and other legal instruments. International human rights law reflects the same top-down mode of implementation, pursued in the same crude manner. Because it is law, it requires the consent of states, creating an illusion of symmetry and even-handedness that is missing from foreign aid. Hence the insistence, wholly absent from discussions about foreign aid, that western countries are subject to international human rights law as other countries are.

The strong claims made by the doctrine of human rights continue to provoke considerable scepticism and debates about the content, nature and justifications of human rights to this day. It has also been argued that human rights are "God-given", although this notion has been criticized. In some cases, the perceived need to protect human rights and maintain peace has led to humanitarian intervention. There is evidence that internationally we are moving towards the notion that governments have not only a negative duty to respect human rights, but also a positive duty to safeguard these rights, preserve life and protect people from having their rights violated by others. Many believe that states' duties to intervene should not be determined by proximity, but rather by the severity of the crisis. They include civil and political rights, which refer to a person’s rights to take part in the civil and political life of their community without discrimination or oppression.

In truly international human rights institutions, such as the UN human rights council, there is a drastic lack of consensus between nations. To avoid being compelled by international institutions to recognise rights that they reject, countries give them little power. The multiple institutions lack a common hierarchical superior – unlike national courts – and thus provide conflicting interpretations of human rights, and cannot compel nations to pay attention to them. That is why, for instance, western countries have been able to disregard the human rights council’s endorsement of “defamation of religion”, the idea that criticism of Islam and other religions violates the human rights of those who practice those religions. Part of the problem was that a disagreement opened up early on between the US and the Soviet Union. The Americans argued that human rights consisted of political rights – the rights to vote, to speak freely, not to be arbitrarily detained, to practise a religion of one’s choice, and so on.

Despite the horrifying genocide in Rwanda in 1994, and the civil war in Yugoslavia, the 1990s were the high-water mark for the idea of human rights. Human rights played an increasingly important role in the European Union and members insisted that countries hoping to join the EU to obtain economic benefits should be required to respect human rights as well. NGOs devoted to advancing human rights also grew during this period, and many countries that emerged from under the Soviet yoke adopted western constitutional systems. We should note that the universality of human rights does not in any way threaten the rich diversity of individuals or of different cultures. Diversity requires a world where everyone is equal, and equally deserving of respect.

Proponents of cultural relativism suggest that human rights are not all universal, and indeed conflict with some cultures and threaten their survival. The development of this tradition of natural justice into one of natural law is usually attributed to the Stoics. Natural law theories base human rights on a "natural" moral, religious or even biological order which is independent of transitory human laws or traditions. The African Union is a supranational union consisting of fifty-five African states. Established in 2001, the AU's purpose is to help secure Africa's democracy, human rights, and a sustainable economy, especially by bringing an end to intra-African conflict and creating an effective common market.

UN member countries believed that the protection of human rights would help ensure freedom, justice and peace for all in the future. Other theories hold that human rights codify moral behavior which is a human social product developed by a process of biological and social evolution . Human rights are also described as a sociological pattern of rule setting . These approaches include the notion that individuals in a society accept rules from legitimate authority in exchange for security and economic advantage – a social contract. Economic sanctions are often levied upon individuals or states who commit human rights violations.